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Patterns of Prejudice

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Revolution and antisemitism: the Bolsheviks in1917

Brendan McGeever

To cite this article: Brendan McGeever (2017) Revolution and antisemitism: the Bolsheviks in1917, Patterns of Prejudice, 51:3-4, 235-252, DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2017.1351798

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Revolution and antisemitism: the Bolsheviksin 1917

BRENDAN McGEEVER

ABSTRACT McGeever’s essay offers an analysis of the Bolshevik encounter withantisemitism in 1917. Antisemitism was the dominant modality of racializedOthering in late imperial Russia. Yet 1917 transformed Jewish life, setting in motiona sudden and intense period of emancipation. In Russian society more generally,the dramatic escalation of working-class mobilization resulted not only in thetoppling of the Tsar in February, but the coming to power of the Bolsheviks justeight months later. Running alongside these revolutionary transformations,however, was the re-emergence of anti-Jewish violence and the returning spectre ofpogroms. Russia in 1917, then, presents an excellent case study for exploring how asocialist movement responded to rising antisemitism in a moment of political crisisand escalating class conflict. His article does two things. First, it charts how theBolsheviks understood antisemitism, and how they responded to it during Russia’syear of revolution. In doing so, it finds that Bolsheviks participated in a wide-ranging set of campaigns organized by the socialist left, the hub of which wascomposed of the soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies. Second, the essay arguesthat antisemitism traversed the political divide in revolutionary Russia, findingtraction across all social groups and political projects. As the political crisisdeepened in the course of 1917, the Bolsheviks increasingly had to contend with theantisemitism within the movement. In traditional Marxist accounts, racism andradicalism are often framed in contestation. McGeever’s article, however, offers amore complex picture in which antisemitism and revolutionary politics could beoverlapping, as well as competing world views.

KEYWORDS antisemitism, Bolsheviks, Jews, 1917, revolution, Russia, Russian Revolution,socialism, workers

This article examines the Bolshevik response to antisemitism in Russiabetween the two revolutions of 1917. The February Revolution of 1917

transformed Russian Jewish life. Just days after the abdication of Tsar NicholasII and the formation of the Provisional Government, all legal restrictions onRussian Jewry were lifted. More than 140 anti-Jewish statutes, totallingsome 1,000 pages, were removed overnight. To mark this historic momentof abolition, a special meeting was convened by the Petrograd soviet. It wasthe eve of Passover, 24 March 1917. The Jewish delegate who addressed themeeting immediately made the connection: the February Revolution, he

Patterns of Prejudice, 2017Vol. 51, Nos. 3–4, 235–252, https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2017.1351798

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

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said, was comparable to the liberation of Jews from slavery in Egypt.1 Formalemancipation, however, was not accompanied by the disappearance ofantisemitism. In 1917, the spectre of pogroms once again returned to Russia,prefiguring the dramatic escalation of antisemitic violence that would eruptduring the Civil War in 1918 and 1919.Despite the vast literature on the 1917 revolutions, there has been compara-

tively little scholarly interest in the specific question of antisemitism duringthis period. Indeed, 1917 represents the least analysed chapter in the historyof the waves of antisemitic violence that spanned the late imperial and revolu-tionary years (1871–1922).2 A century on, there exists only a handful of seriousworks on the subject.3 While the scale of anti-Jewish violence between Febru-ary and October in 1917 in no way matched that of, say, the 1903–6 or 1918–22pogrom waves, Russian society in 1917 bore witness to a sharp increase inantisemitism. Newspaper reports, for example, indicate that at least 235attacks against Jews were carried out in 1917. Although totalling just 4.5 percent of the population, Jews were victims of around a third of all acts ofphysical violence against national minorities during Russia’s year of revolu-tion.4 Just as in 1905, violent antisemitism in 1917 was closely connected tothe ebb and flow of revolution. Although levels of antisemitism were com-paratively low during the February Revolution, antisemitism would escalatelater in the year at precisely those moments of revolutionary upheaval: theJuly Days, the Kornilov Affair in August and the October Revolution.This article has two main objectives. First, it examines the Bolshevik

response to antisemitism between February and October 1917. It finds thatthe Bolsheviks took part in helping to elaborate a broad cross-party strategyagainst antisemitism comprising all socialist forces. The political expressionof this united front was the proliferation of soviets of workers’ and soldiers’deputies. As the article shows, the soviets took a number of concrete measures

1 B. D. Gal’perina, O. N. Znamenskii and V. I. Startsev (eds), Petrogradskii Sovet Rabochikh iSoldatskikh Deputatov v 1917 godu: dokumenty i materialy, vol. 1 (Leningrad: Nauka Lenin-gradskoe Otdelenie 1991), 494.

2 Vladimir P. Buldakov, ‘Freedom, shortages, violence: the origins of the “revolutionaryanti-Jewish pogrom” in Russia, 1917–1918’, in Jonathon Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt,Natan M. Meir and Israel Bartal (eds), Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom inEast European History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2010),74–91 (87).

3 Ilias Cherikover, Antisemitizm i pogromy na Ukraine, 1917–1918 (Berlin: Osjudisches His-torisches Archiv 1923); Vladimir P. Buldakov, ‘Rossiiskoe evreistvo i Bol’shevistskii Per-evorot v Petrograde, Oktriabr’ 1917–Ianvar’ 1918 goda’, in Oleg Budnitskii (ed.), ArkhivEvreiskoi Istorii, vol. 4 (Moscow: ROSSPEN 2007), 92–124; Vladimir P. Buldakov, Khaos ietnos: Etnicheskie konflikty v Rossii, 1917–1918 gg.: usloviia vozniknoveniia, khronika, kom-mentarii, analiz (Moscow: Novyi khronograf 2010); Michael Beizer, ‘Antisemitism in Pet-rograd/Leningrad, 1917–1930’, East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 29, no. 1–2, 1999, 5–28(5–14); and Oleg Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu Krasnymi i Belymi, 1917–1920(Moscow ROSSPEN 2005), 52–93.

4 Buldakov, Khaos i etnos, 1019.

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throughout 1917, both locally and nationally, to confront the rising antisemit-ism in Russian society.Second, the article demonstrates that antisemitism traversed the political

divide in revolutionary Russia, finding traction across all social groups andwithin all political projects. From June 1917 onwards, the Bolsheviks increas-ingly faced accusations from their socialist rivals that sections of the workingclass embracing the Bolshevik project were doing so by fusing revolutionarydiscourse with antisemitism. Whereas radicalism and racism are oftenframed in contestation, the critical analysis of 1917 offered here reveals amore complex picture in which antisemitism and revolutionary politicswere overlapping as well as competing world views.

The socialist conceptualization of antisemitism in 1917: thecentrality of the ‘bourgeois revolution’

The Bolshevik response to antisemitism in 1917 was part of a broader cross-party strategic alliance stretching back to 1905, comprising revolutionaries,reformist socialists and liberals.5 Within this milieu, antisemitism was under-stood from ‘the standpoint of the bourgeois revolution’: that is, the belief thatthe founding of a bourgeois, capitalist democratic republic would create theconditions for the eradication of antisemitism and indeed all forms of nationaloppression.6 Ever since the 1905 Revolution, most Russian socialists (Jewishand non-Jewish alike) had identified antisemitism with tsarism. Followingthe February 1917 Revolution, antisemitism now came to be seen as themost reactionary form of restorationist counter-revolution. This was a per-spective shared not just by socialists, but by many non-socialists in Jewish pol-itical life. For example, an editorial in the liberal Jewish newspaper EvreiskaiaNedelia (The Jewish Week) in September 1917 asked:

Who needs this [pogromist] agitation? A priori, it is those elements who seek areturn to the old regime. If, before [February 1917], pogromist agitation

5 On socialist responses to antisemitism in Russia prior to 1917, see Gerald D. Surh,‘Russian Jewish socialists and antisemitism: the case of Grigorii Aronson’, in thesepages; Igor’ V. Bobrov, ‘Evreiskii Vopros v Ideologii i Politicheckoi Deiatel’nosti Rossii-skikh Marksistov (konets XIX v.—fevral’ 1917 g.)’, Ph.D. dissertation, Tyumen StateUniversity, Tyumen, Russia, 2003; and Brendan McGeever, ‘The Bolshevik Confronta-tion with Antisemitism in the Russian Revolution, 1917–1919’, D.Phil. dissertation, Uni-versity of Glasgow, 2015, 23–30.

6 Brendan McGeever, ‘Bolshevik responses to antisemitism during the Civil War: spa-tiality, temporality, and agency’, in Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read and PeterWaldron (eds), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–1922. Book 4: TheStruggle for the State (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers 2017). For a broader discus-sion of this theme, see also Enzo Traverso, The Marxists and the Jewish Question: TheHistory of a Debate 1843–1943, trans. from the French by Bernard Gibbons (AtlanticHighlands, NJ: Humanities Press 1994).

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supported the old regime by turning the masses away from revolutionary pro-paganda, then now it carried those elements who want to return the old regimeto power.7

As we shall see later in this article, however, such neat distinctions between‘revolutionaries’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’ became difficult to sustain asantisemitism asserted itself across the political divide. Nevertheless, this per-spective had a significant mobilizing capacity. Despite their deep-rooteddifferences, almost all socialists had an entrenched interest in defending thegains of the February Revolution.8 In so far as antisemitism could be seen tothreaten those gains by bringing back the detested tsarist regime, there wassignificant scope for building a united front against it. This is precisely whathappened: rooted in their commitment to the bourgeois revolution, socialistsset aside their party differences and confronted antisemitism and pogromistviolence.

The socialist response to antisemitism in 1917: the soviets and thestrategy of the united front

The institutional hub of the socialist response to antisemitism in 1917 was thesoviets of workers’ and soldiers’deputies. Conceived during the 1905 Revolu-tion, the Petrograd soviet was re-established in the Russian capital followingthe February Revolution of 1917. By March 1917 there were more than 600soviets in various regions and, by the summer, they had been establishedacross the whole of Russia, a process bringing about the unique phenomenonof dual power: the balance of forces between the ostensibly ruling ProvisionalGovernment and the increasingly powerful soviets.9 The soviets were non-party institutions that engaged in broad cross-class, cross-party campaigns.Despite bitter inter-party fighting in 1917, cross-party alliances were the defin-ing characteristic of the soviet model, as was shown in August when the threatof counter-revolution in the shape of the Kornilov Affair was swiftly put downby an alliance of all formations left of the Kadets.10 The politics of the soviets

7 ‘Pogromnaia Opastnost’ i mery samozashchity’ (Pogromist danger and the means ofself-defence), Evreiskaia Nedelia, no. 36–7, 12 September 1917, 1. Translations from theRussian, unless other stated, are by the author.

8 Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, trans. from the Russianby John G. Wright and Brian Pearce (London: New Park Publications 1971), 163.

9 Nikolai N. Smirnov, ‘The soviets’, in Edward Acton, Vladimir Cherniaev and WilliamG. Rosenberg (eds), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921 (Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press 1997), 429–37 (429–30).

10 Diane Koenker, ‘The evolution of party consciousness in 1917: the case of the Moscowworkers’, Soviet Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 1978, 38–62 (61). The Kornilov Affair was anattempted military coup led by General Kornilov against the Provisional Government;the Kadets were members of the liberal democratic Konstitutsionno-Demokratiche-skaia Partiia (Constitutional Democratic Party).

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was, in effect, the politics of the united front,11 and the socialist confrontationwith antisemitism was also rooted in this strategy.The soviets responded to antisemitism immediately following the Febru-

ary Revolution. Just five days after its formation, on 3 March, the Petrogradsoviet established a commission, headed by the Bundist Moishe Rafes,whose task it was to stop Black Hundreds from trying to ‘sow nationalhatred among the population’. Three days later, on 6 March, the commis-sion sent representatives to the north-west of Petrograd to respond to anincrease in ‘antisemitic agitation’. Later that week, reports came in of‘pogrom literature’ being distributed in the capital.12 Similarly, just daysafter it was established, the Moscow soviet immediately began to monitorinstances of antisemitism.13 Though, the Petrograd soviet continued toreceive warnings about impending pogroms throughout the month ofApril,14 actual outbreaks of antisemitic violence were few and farbetween during that period. In June, however, antisemitism increasedmarkedly on the streets of the Russian capital and, beyond, in the formerPale of Settlement. In mid-June the Petrograd soviet sent a special commis-sion to the Ukrainian city of Elisavetgrad and its neighbouring towns in anattempt to ensure a local soviet response in the event of an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence.15 By the third week of June, crowds of workers werereportedly gathering in Petrograd to welcome pogromist speeches purport-ing to reveal the ‘real’ names of the Jewish members of the Petrogradsoviet.16 Bolshevik leaders sometimes came face to face with such antisemit-ism. When walking through the streets of the capital in early July, the Bol-shevik Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich—Lenin’s future secretary—encountered

11 Leon Trotsky, Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front, trans. from the German (London:Bookmarks 1989), 132–8.

12 Gal’perina, Znamenskii and Startsev (eds), Petrogradskii Sovet Rabochikh i SoldatskikhDeputatov v 1917 godu, 84, 132, 176, 190, 342. The commission continued to takemeasures to combat antisemitism throughout 1917. On 22 May, for example, itinstructed the Ministry of Military Affairs to take action against reported antisemitsimwithin the Russian army. See B. D. Gal’perina and V. I. Startsev (eds), Petrogradskii SovetRabochikh i Soldatskikh Deputatov v 1917 godu: dokumenty i materialy, vol. 3 (Moscow:ROSSPEN 2002), 132.

13 See documents concerning attacks on the Moscow soviet by the Black Hundreds, 31March 1917–1 November 1917: Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv moskovskoioblasti, Moscow (Central State Archive of the Moscow Region), hereafter TsGAMO,f. 66 o.25 d.45 l.1–45.

14 Letter ‘To the Soviet of Workers Deputies’ by a church representative in St Petersburgwarning of impending pogroms, 4 April 1917: Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rosiiskoi Fed-eratsii, Moscow (State Archive of the Russian Federation), hereafter GARF, f. 504 o.1d.528 l.1.

15 Hans Rogger, ‘Conclusions and overview’, in John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza(eds), Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge, New York,Melbourne and Sydney: Cambridge University Press 1992), 314–72 (350).

16 Buldakov, Khaos i etnos, 317.

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various groups of people openly calling for anti-Jewish pogroms.17 Aroundthe same time, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnov noted in his diary that hetoo had heard people calling for pogroms at the Aleksandr Market in Petro-grad.18 More and more reports came in of similar gatherings. At some ofthem, class resentment and antisemitic representations of Jewishness over-lapped: in late July, speakers at a street-corner rally in the city centre calledon the crowd to ‘smash the Jews and the bourgeoisie!’19 As the socialistnewspaper Izvestiia put it: ‘Lately, on the streets of Petrograd and othercities, pogrom-like persecution of the Jews goes on almost before our veryeyes.’20 Whereas, in the immediate aftermath of the February Revolution,such speeches had failed to have any real traction on the streets of Petro-grad, they now were drawing large audiences.21 It was in this contextthat the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’Deputies gathered in Petrograd.This First Congress of Soviets was composed of 1,090 delegates from all

socialist parties and represented more than 336 local soviets, scores of militaryunits and more than 20 million Russian citizens.22 This was, without question,a historic gathering of the revolutionary movement. Throughout the month ofJune, the Congress met daily to discuss a range of political issues, includingthe convocation of a constituent assembly, the ongoing war, the land questionand many others matters. On 22 June, however, as reports continued to floodin of yet more antisemitic incidents, the Congress produced the most author-itative statement on antisemitism by the socialist movement yet.On that morning, a meeting of the Congress’s special Commission on the

National Question was held to draft a special resolution ‘On the Struggleagainst Antisemitism’.23 This task was allocated to the Bolshevik Evgenii Pre-obrazhenskii,24 who just two days previously had openly condemned the

17 These recollections were included in a speech delivered by Bonch-Bruevich on 28October 1917. The speech was printed in Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, Krovavyi Navet naKhristian (Moscow 1919), 11. A copy of this title is held in Bonch-Bruevich’s personalfiles in the manuscripts department of the Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka,Moscow (Russian State Library), Fond rukopisei, f. 369 o. 49 d. 28.

18 Simon Dubnow, Kniga Zhizni: Vospominaniia i razmyshleniia. Materialy dlia istorii moegovremeni (Moscow and Jerusalem: Gesharim 2004), 417.

19 Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd(New York: W. W. Norton 1978), 43.

20 Beizer, ‘Antisemitism in Petrograd/Leningrad’, 8.21 Ibid., 7; Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu Krasnymi i Belymi, 83–4.22 Vasilii L’vov-Rogachevskii, Goniteli evreiskogo naroda v Rossii: Istoricheskii ocherk

(Moscow: Moskovskii Sovet Rabochikh Deputatov, Otdel Izdatel’stva i KnizhnogoSklada 1917), 1.

23 Ibid., 3.24 Preobrazhenskii would again return to the question of antisemitism two years later, in

1919, when he included a special subchapter dedicated specifically to antisemitism inABC of Communism; see Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, The ABC ofCommunism [1919] (London: Merlin Press 2006), 199–200.

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Provisional Government for delaying its decision to take measures to protect‘oppressed national minorities’.25 Preobrazhenskii’s resolution on antisemit-ism was passed unanimously by the Commission on the National Question,and was then immediately put to the Congress delegates later that sameday. Prior to reading out his resolution before the assembled delegates, Pre-obrazhenskii began with an impassioned speech:

Congress cannot let this issue pass without making a special appeal to thewhole demokratiia [socialist movement], it cannot let this pass without propos-ing a series of measures to ensure its duty to the Jewish people and show to themasses that this anti-Jewish demagogy is carried out in order to restore tsarismand destroy the freedoms won by the revolution.26

Preobrazhenskii identified antisemitism as an attempt to enact a counter-revo-lution against February and restore tsarism, a perspective firmly in keepingwith ‘the standpoint of the bourgeois revolution’ discussed above. It is alsoworth noting that, despite the deepening split between the soviet leadershipand the increasingly radicalized and bolshevized cadres, Preobrazhenskii con-tinued to appeal to the whole socialist movement, without party distinction. Inother words, for the Bolshevik Preobrazhenskii, the campaign against antise-mitism was an issue that could forge alliances across the socialist left, and,indeed, it was something that required such unity.The resolution itself had two important things to say about antisemitism.

First, Preobrazhenskii instructed ‘all local soviets… to carry out relentless pro-paganda and educational work among the masses in order to combat anti-Jewish persecution’.27 This underscored the profoundly educative role of thesoviets. Second, the resolution warned of the ‘great danger’ posed by the ‘ten-dency for antisemitism to disguise itself under radical slogans’. This admis-sion that antisemitism and radical leftist politics could articulate with oneanother was relatively new territory for revolutionaries who, until then, hadtended to frame antisemitism as the preserve of the counter-revolutionaryright. Within the coming weeks, the Bolsheviks would discover the extent towhich antisemitic and revolutionary discourse could indeed overlap. Fornow, however, the message of the resolution was clear: the appearance of anti-semitism under revolutionary slogans represented ‘an enormous threat to theJewish people and the whole revolutionary movement, since it threatens todrown the liberation of the people in the blood of our brothers, and cover in

25 M. F. Vladimirskii, A. S. Enukidze, M. N. Pokrovskii and A. A. Iakovleva (eds), PervyiVserossiiskii S’ezd Sovetov Rabochikh i Soldatskikh Deputatov, vol. 2 (Moscow: Gosizdat1931), 182. See also ‘Soviet resolution on the national question’, in Robert PaulBrowder and Alexandr F. Kerensky (eds), The Russian Provisional Government 1917:Documents, 3 vols (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1961), 318–19.

26 Vladimirskii, Enukidze, Pokrovskii and Iakovleva (eds), Pervyi Vserossiiskii S’ezdSovetov Rabochikh i Soldatskikh Deputatov, 241.

27 Ibid., 239–41.

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disgrace the entire revolutionary movement’. When Preobrazhenskii finishedreading aloud the resolution, a Jewish delegate rose to state his wholeheartedagreement with it, before adding that, although it would not bring back hisfellow-Jews murdered in the pogroms of 1905, it would nevertheless helpheal some of the wounds that continued to cause so much pain in theJewish community. The resolution was passed unanimously by theCongress.28

What were the consequences of this historic meeting? Writing in September1917, the veteran Menshevik Vasili L’vov-Rogachevskii lamented that thesoviets had not taken antisemitism seriously following the Congress, pointingout that the promised educational campaigns had not materialized and thatthe soviets had generally failed to publish literature on antisemitism.29

While the soviets may well have failed to respond to the growth of antisemit-ism in late June and July, newspaper sources fromAugust and September indi-cate that a campaign was indeed eventually set in motion by various regionalsoviets. For example, in response to growing reports of antisemitic agitation,the Moscow soviet undertook a series of measures, including organizing lec-tures and talks in Moscow factories on antisemitism.30 On 20 August theMoscow soviet also convened a meeting to debate the sharp increase in anti-semitic propaganda, and a special commission was formed to campaignlocally against antisemitism. On the following day, 21 August, the commissionorganized another meeting, this time one that included not only the deputiesfrom the local Moscow district soviets, but trade unionists and representativesof the regional Duma as well.31 In the former Pale of Settlement, local sovietswere instrumental in preventing antisemitic pogroms. For example, in Cherni-gov (Ukraine) in mid-August, accusations by the Black Hundreds that Jewswere stocking up bread led to a series of violent anti-Jewish disturbances. Cru-cially, it took a delegation from the Kiev soviet to organize a group of localtroops to put down the unrest.32 Other small-scale interventions occurred inplaces further afield: in late August the local soviet in Slutsk—a city southof Minsk—issued a special resolution against antisemitism in light of pogrom-ist agitation by a group of monks at a local monastery.33

Soviet attempts to combat antisemitism continued throughout September.Early in the month, the Moscow soviet again issued a special proclamationagainst pogroms, calling on meetings to be set up for workers to discuss anti-semitism.34 On 17 September the aforementioned L’vov-Rogachevskii deliv-ered a lecture to the Moscow branch of the Menshevik party on the topic‘The Jews in Russia and Their Role in the Revolutionary Movement’. Other

28 Ibid., 241.29 L’vov-Rogachevskii, Goniteli evreiskogo naroda v Rossii, 102.30 Evreiskaia Zhizn’ (Jewish Life), no. 38–9, 29 September 1917, 20.31 Razsvet (Dawn), no. 8, 30 August 1917, 24.32 Buldakov, Khaos i etnos, 389–99.33 Razsvet, no. 8, 30 August 1917, 33.34 Buldakov, Khaos i etnos, 429.

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lectures on similar themes continued to be delivered in workplaces andsoviets throughout September.35 On 13 September, yet another commissionwas established to confront pogroms, this time by the Kiev soviet, and itswork included arranging meetings for ‘various democratic organizations’ onthe topic of antisemitism.36 This again points to the centrality of cross-partyand cross-class alliances in the campaigns against antisemitism. Despitethe growing bolshevization of the soviets, the fight against antisemitismwas something that continued to require the participation of all socialistparties.Moderate socialists in the Provisional Government, we should note,

attempted to initiate their own response to antisemitism. On 14 September,at a meeting of the government, the Menshevik A. M. Nikitin explicitlyraised the issue of pogroms. Government representatives responded bypassing a resolution that promised to take ‘the most drastic measuresagainst all pogromists’.37 At another meeting, on 29 September, governmentministers were given ‘all powers at their disposal’ to put down pogroms.38

In the government’s own words, stopping pogroms was to be achieved bystrengthening ‘military and civil authorities’ and ‘local organs of govern-ment’.39 Despite these and other related initiatives, however, the ProvisionalGovernment’s power had virtually disintegrated: with its ideological andrepressive state apparatuses almost completely paralysed by mid-late1917,40 it was in no position to respond adequately to outbreaks of antisemit-ism.41 An editorial in the pro-government newspaper Russkie Vedomosti on 1October captured the situation in stark terms: ‘The wave of pogroms growsand expands…mountains of telegrams arrive daily… [yet] the ProvisionalGovernment is snowed under… the local administration is powerless to doanything… the means of coercion are completely exhausted’.42

Not so with the soviets. As the political crisis deepened in October, scores ofprovincial soviets established their own repressive state apparatuses for com-batting antisemitism. For example, on 7 October in Vitebsk, a city 350 mileswest of Moscow, the local soviet formed a military unit to protect the city

35 Evreiskaia Zhizn’, no. 38–9, 29 September 1917, 20.36 Buldakov, Khaos i etnos, 432.37 Ibid.38 Cherikover, Antisemitizm i pogromy na Ukraine, 207; Buldakov, Khaos i etnos, 423.39 ‘Against anarchy’, in Browder and Kerensky (eds), The Russian Provisional Government,

1644.40 The concepts ‘repressive’ and ‘ideological’ state apparatuses are used here in the

Althusserian sense to identify and distinguish between two spheres of state activity:the ‘repressive state apparatuses’ that predominantly function through coercion (thearmy, police and courts); and the ‘ideological state apparatuses’ that functionthrough ideology and persuasion. See Louis Althusser, On The Reproduction of Capital-ism: Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses (London: Verso 2014).

41 Buldakov Khaos i etnos, 318; Buldakov, ‘Freedom, shortages, violence’, 74.42 ‘The warfare against pogroms’, in Browder and Kerensky (eds), The Russian Provisional

Government, 1646 (emphasis added).

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from pogromists.43 The following week, the Orel soviet passed a resolution totake up arms against all forms of antisemitic violence.44 By the middle of themonth, ‘soviet anti-antisemitism’ had even spread to the Russian Far East,where a meeting of the All-Siberian soviet issued a resolution protestingagainst pogroms, declaring that the local revolutionary army was preparedto take ‘all measures necessary’ to prevent them.45 This remarkable displayof solidarity shows how deeply ingrained the fight against antisemitismwas within sections of the organized socialist movement. Even in places inthe Far East where there were comparatively few Jews and even fewerpogroms,46 local soviets identified with the Jews on the Western Front whowere suffering at the hands of pogromists and antisemites.That the soviets had become, bymid-late 1917, the principle source of social-

ist opposition to antisemitism seems beyond doubt. In mid-September, eventhe highly critical liberal Jewish newspaper Evreiskaia Nedelia admitted in aneditorial: ‘It must be said, and we must give them their dues, the soviets…have carried out an energetic struggle against [pogroms]… and in manyplaces it has only been thanks to their strength that peace has been restored.’47

However, we should also note that the fight against antisemitism wasunevenly developed at the local level. In mid-October in Tambov (a city 300miles south of Moscow), the local soviet met to discuss measures to stop therecent outbreak of pogromist violence. During the discussion, members ofthe soviet reportedly shouted ‘Why stop the pogrom? Let’s join in (idem pods-obliat’)!’48 Nevertheless, the overall picture that emerges from even the criticalJewish press in 1917 is one that points to the soviets playing a leading role incombatting antisemitic violence.Such opposition to antisemitism from below was replicated from above by

the Vserossiiskii Tsentral’nyi Ispolnitel’nyi Komitet (VTsIK, All-RussianExecutive Committee)—the head organization of the soviets—when it wroteto all soviet deputies on 7 October demanding that a commission consistingof all soviet parties and trade unions be formed in every city to fight antisemit-ism. The commissions were also instructed to issue leaflets and brochuresdenouncing anti-Jewish violence.49 Three days later, on 10 October, theVTsIK met again to outline further measures against antisemitism, with the

43 Buldakov, Khaos i etnos, 446.44 Ibid., 454.45 ‘Protest against Jewish pogroms’ (English translation of title), Izvestiia VTsIK, 21

October 1917, 2.46 Although see Lilia Kalmina ‘The possibility of the impossible: pogroms in Eastern

Siberia’, in Dekel-Chen, Gaunt, Meir and Bartal (eds), Anti-Jewish Violence, 131–44.47 ‘Pogromnaia Opastnost’ i mery samozashchity’.48 ‘The soviet of the Russian Republic’ (English translation of editorial title), Evreiskaia

Nedelia, no. 41, 15 October 1917, 1.49 Telegram from the Central Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet of Workers’and

Soldiers’ Deputies to all soviets instructing them to form commissions to combatpogroms, 7 October 1917: TsGAMO, f. 66 o.3 d.865 l.1–2.

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Bundist Abramovich leading the discussions.50 Most symbolic of all, however,was the resolution passed against antisemitism by the 2nd All-Russian Con-gress of Soviets on 26 October: ‘The honour… of the revolution demandsthat no such pogroms take place… the whole of revolutionary Russia andthe world is watching you.’51 The timing could not have been more dramatic:the resolution was issued at the very moment that Red Guards seized theWinter Palace. The wording of this resolution appeared to reveal a concernon behalf of the Congress that a revolutionary insurrection might enlargethe scope for pogroms. This fear that revolution—and in particular a Bolshevikrevolution—would exacerbate the threat of the pogroms was something thatwas felt across the socialist left.

Antisemitism in the revolutionary movement

The sociologist Goran Therborn once noted that ideologies do not exist in apure form or as something possessed or not possessed. On the contrary,they ‘coexist, compete, and clash… affect, and contaminate one another’.The task, then, of the sociologist is to try to show ‘the patterning of therelationships between given ideologies’.52 For the Bolshevik leadership, revo-lutionary politics were simply incompatible with antisemitism; they were atopposite ends of the political spectrum. As a front page headline in theparty’s main newspaper Pravda would later put it: ‘To be against the Jews isto be for the Tsar!’53 Yet, when it came to the party rank and file, theoverlap between revolutionary Bolshevism and counter-revolutionary antise-mitism in 1917 appears to have been real. Revolution and antisemitism existednot only in conflict, but in articulation as well.For all that the Bolsheviks played an unquestionably crucial role in the broad

socialist response to antisemitism in 1917, newspaper reports from the summerand autumn of that year show that they were frequently accused by othersocialists of perpetuating antisemitism and even harbouring antisemiteswithin the party’s social base. For example, in June, Georgii Plekhanov’s anti-Bolshevik newspaper Edinstvo reported that, when Menshevik agitatorsspoke at the Moscow barracks in the Vyborg region of Petrograd during theregional Duma elections, soldiers, apparently egged on by Bolsheviks,

50 Buldakov, Khaos i etnos, 446.51 Iu. A. Akhapkin, M. P. Iroshnikov and A. V. Gogolevskii (eds), Dekrety Sovetskoi Vlasti o

Petrograde: 25 oktiabria (7 noiabria) 1917 g—29 dekabria 1918 g. (Leningrad: Lenizdat1986), 14. This decree was also published in the Bolshevik newspapers SoldatskaiaPravda (Soldiers’ Truth) and Derevenskaia Bednota (The Village Poor) on 28 October1917 and, again, in the Zionist weekly Razsvet, in no. 17–18, 22 November 1917, 50.

52 Goran Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London and New York:Verso 1980), vii, 31–2, 79.

53 Article by the Bolshevik Il’ia Vardin, Pravda, 14 May 1919, 1.

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shouted ‘Down with them! They’re all Yids!’54 According to the Bundist MarkLiber, when hundreds of thousands of workers protested in Petrograd on 18June, Bolsheviks reportedly tore down Bundist banners and shouted antisemi-tic slogans. When Liber raised this at a session of the Petrograd soviet on 20June, he went so far as to accuse the Bolsheviks of being pro-pogromist.55

The Menshevik newspaper Vpered also reported in June that, at an openmeeting in the Mar’ina Roshcha district of Moscow, Bolsheviks shouteddown Mensheviks, accusing them of being ‘Yids’ who ‘exploit the proletar-iat’.56 Reports of Bolshevik antisemitism aimed at Mensheviks in Moscow con-tinued throughout the July Days,57 and were replicated in other cities too. InOdessa, for example, reports reached the Zionist press that Bolshevik agitationamong soldiers had an explicitly antisemitic character. In response, the localOdessa soviet closed down Jewish shops in an attempt to prevent apogrom.58 Such reports became even more frequent during the critical weeksin October and November. Ilia Ehrenburg, who would go on to be one ofthe most prolific and well-known Jewish writers in the Soviet Union, wrotethe following letter to his friend M. A Voloshin a few days after the Octoberinsurrection. It stands as perhaps the most vivid description of the articulationbetween antisemitism and the revolutionary process in 1917:

Yesterday I was standing in line, waiting to vote for the Constituent Assembly.People were saying ‘Whoever’s against the Yids, vote for number 5! [the Bol-sheviks]’, ‘Whoever’s for world-wide revolution, vote for number 5!’ The patri-arch rode by, sprinkling holy water; everyone removed their hats. A group ofsoldiers passing by started to belt out the Internationale in his direction. Wheream I? Or is this truly hell?59

In this startling account, the apparently obvious distinction between revolu-tionary Bolshevism and counter-revolutionary antisemitism is blurred.Around the same time, in the Okhta region of Petrograd, the writer

54 Cited in an overview of the Russian press entitled (English) ‘Antisemitism and demo-gogy’, in Evreiskaia Nedelia, no. 25, 25 June 1917, 25. Plekhanov, we should note, wasvehemently anti-Bolshevik by mid-1917, so this source should be treated with somecaution. Furthermore, in 1917, radicalized soldiers regularly spoke at political meetings‘as Bolsheviks’, even when they had no party credentials. This sometimes led Bolshevikleaders to demand party credentials be shown before rank-and-file members couldspeak at rallies. See Vatslav Sol’skii, 1917 god v Zapadnoi Obslati i Zapadnom Fronte(Minsk: Tesei 2004), 141. I thank Gleb Albert for bringing this source to my attention.

55 Gal’perina and Startsev (eds), Petrogradskii Sovet Rabochikh i Soldatskikh Deputatov v 1917godu, vol. 3, 348, 352. See also Beizer, ‘Antisemitism in Petrograd/Leningrad’, 8.

56 Cited in an overview of the Russian press entitled (English) ‘Antisemitism and demo-gogy’, in Evreiskaia Nedelia, no. 25, 25 June 1917, 26.

57 Buldakov, Khaos i etnos, 340. The ‘July Days’ (3–7 July 1917) refer to an uprising ofworkers and soldiers in Petrograd against the Provisional Government.

58 Ibid., 341, 344.59 Quoted in Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu Krasnymi i Belymi, 88.

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Solomon Lur’e similarly observed Bolsheviks assuring voters queuing up tovote in the Constituent Assembly elections that the head of the ProvisionalGovernment, Alexander Kerensky, was in fact a Jew and that, for thisreason, they should choose to support the Bolsheviks.60 Kerensky, of course,was not Jewish but such antisemitism did not operate according to logic orverifiable empirical observation. Indeed, the Provisional Government was fre-quently labelled by antisemites as ‘Jewish’, despite the fact that there were noJews in the government. One arresting illustration of the extraordinary degreeto which antisemitism could take flight from reality is captured when Ker-ensky, leaving the Winter Palace by car on the night of the Bolshevik insurrec-tion, noticed that someone had painted in huge letters across the palace wall:‘Down with the Jew Kerensky, Long Live Trotsky!’61 These examples prefig-ured Isaac Babel’s haunting question in Red Cavalry: ‘which is the Revolutionand which the counterrevolution?’62 Despite Bolshevik insistence that antise-mitism was a purely ‘counter-revolutionary’ phenomenon,63 it clearly eludedsuch neat categorization, and could be found across the political divide, inhighly complex and unexpected forms.What constituted the social basis of this apparent antisemitism on the revo-

lutionary left? In a Jewish newspaper issued shortly after the October Revolu-tion, it was claimed that antisemitic Black Hundreds were ‘filling up the ranksof the Bolsheviks’across the whole country.64 Such claims certainly ought to betreated with a strong degree of caution. Nevertheless, the notion that Bolshe-vism could be appealing to far-right antisemites was not entirely without sub-stance: in some far-right circles the October Revolution was welcomed in thehours immediately following the seizure of power. For example, an astonish-ing editorial in the antisemitic paper Groza (Thunderstorm) on 29 Octoberdeclared:

The Bolsheviks have seized power. The Jew Kerensky, lackey to the British andthe world’s bankers, having brazenly assumed the title of commander-in-chiefof the armed forces and having appointed himself Prime Minister of the Ortho-dox Russian Tsardom, will be swept out of the Winter Palace, where he haddesecrated the remains of the Peace-Maker Alexander III with his presence.On October 25th, the Bolsheviks united all the regiments who refused to

60 Bogdana Iakovlevna Koprzhiva-Lur’e, Istoriia odnoi zhizni (Paris: Atheneum 1987), 79.61 Marc Ferro, October 1917: A Social History of the Russian Revolution, trans. from the

French by Norman Stone (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1980), 238.62 Isaac Babel, ‘Gedali’, in Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry (New York: W. W. Norton 2003), 63–6

(65).63 When an editorial published in the Kronstadt soviet newspaper Izvestiia claimed that

‘antisemitism and counter-revolution are one and the same thing’ (see Razsvet, no. 2,16 July 1917, 35), it was expressing a longstanding and oft-repeated tenet of the socialistunderstanding of antisemitism.

64 On the growth of antisemitism following the Bolshevik Revolution, see ‘A new wave’(English translation), Evreiskaia Nedelia, no. 43–4, 29 October 1917, 4.

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submit to a government composed of Jew bankers, treasonous generals, traitor-ous land-owners, and thieving merchants.65

It is abundantly clear that the Bolshevik leadership sought to arrest this articu-lation between the antisemitism of the far right and the radicalism of the Bol-shevik project (the Groza newspaper, for example, was immediately closeddown after the revolution). Moreover, we certainly ought to treat withcaution accusations from the Bolsheviks’ socialist adversaries that the partywas full of antisemites, since there was evidently a lot of political capital tobe gained by associating the Bolsheviks with ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Never-theless, the frequency with which such reports appeared (and the aboveaccount is by no means exceptional) does suggest that such articulationswere indeed at play, even if they were overstated.66

In mid-late 1917, Lenin’s pre-revolutionary conception of a small conspira-torial party was discarded as the doors were openedwide to tens of thousandsof new members, many of whom were politicized for the first time.67 Withmany more non-members subscribing to the party’s radical anti-bourgeoiscritique, the Bolsheviks had truly become a mass party. It is not difficult toimagine that the Bolshevik project unwittingly attracted racist and antisemiticelements, including among the working class. In such circumstances, state-ments by the party leadership on antisemitism were clearly not alwaysgoing to be representative of the thoughts and feelings of the party rankand file as a whole. Events in 1918 and 1919 would reveal just how acutethis problem was when, in many regions of the former Pale of Settlement,the Red Army found swathes of pogromists in their midst marching behindthe slogan ‘Smash the Yids, long live Soviet Power!’68

Revolution and antisemitism? Socialist intellectuals and thecritique of the October insurrection

Concern about the overlap between antisemitism and Bolshevism in late 1917was most commonly expressed by moderate socialist intellectuals. Whatunderscored their anxiety was a fear that Lenin’s insistence on insurrectionwould produce a series of unintended consequences, including anti-Jewish

65 Quoted in Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu Krasnymi i Belymi, 87. The apparently ‘pro-Bolshevik’ antisemitism of the newspaper Groza was discussed at a session of the Pet-rograd soviet on 16 October. See B. D. Gal’perina, V. I. Startsev and N. Yu. Cherepenina(eds), Petrogradskii Sovet Rabochikh i Soldatskikh Deputatov v 1917 godu: dokumenty i mate-rialy, vol. 4 (Moscow: ROSSPEN 2003), 524, 530.

66 Beizer, ‘Antisemitism in Petrograd/Leningrad’, 8.67 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, xxi.68 See Brendan McGeever, The Bolsheviks and Antisemitism in the Russian Revolution (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press 2018); see also McGeever, ‘The Bolshevik Confron-tation with Antisemitism in the Russian Revolution’, 99–115, 149–75.

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violence. Attempts to overthrow the Provisional Government and to construct(prematurely) a socialist society would necessarily lead to ‘pogroms’,69 so theyargued. For the Menshevik L’vov-Rogachevskii, the ‘tragedy’ of the RussianRevolution lay in the apparent fact that the ‘the dark masses (temnota) areunable to distinguish the provocateur from the revolutionary, or the Jewishpogrom from a social revolution’.70 Maxim Gorky epitomized this strand ofthinking in his Novaia Zhizn’ writings throughout 1917.71 On 18 October, forexample, he warned that an insurrection would see an ‘unorganized mobpour out into the streets, not knowing what it wants and [it]…will begin to“make the history of the Russian revolution”’. If the Bolsheviks took power,he predicted that ‘this time events will assume an even bloodier pogrom char-acter’.72 Two days earlier, at a session of the Petrograd soviet on 18 October,the Menshevik-Internationalist Isaak Astrov gave a detailed description ofhow ‘pogrom agitation’ was finding traction in sections of the workingclass. Pogromists, he said, were awaiting a Bolshevik insurrection with antici-pation.73 On 24 October, on the eve of revolution, the Menshevik Fedor Danpleaded with the radicalized Petrograd soviet to step back from revolution,warning that ‘counter-revolutionists are waiting with the Bolsheviki tobegin riots and massacres’.74 In Vitebsk, the Socialist Revolutionary newspa-per Vlast’ Naroda reported that Black Hundreds would try to start an anti-

69 The Russian word pogrom went through something of a transformation in 1917 andbegan to take on a much broader significance. Throughout October and November,for example, the front pages of soviet and Bolshevik newspapers carried headlineswarning of pogromist violence, and it is clear that the term was deployed to mean dis-order in general, not just antisemitic violence per se. See, for example, Izvestiia VTsIK,no. 187, 3 October 1917, 1–2; no. 193, 10 October 1917, 4; no. 201, 19 October 1917, 2;no. 204, 22 October 1917, 1; Izvestiia Moskovskogo Soveta Rabochikh Deputatov, no. 201,1 November 1917, 2; no. 202, 2 November 1917, 2; and Soldatskaia Pravda, no. 98, 7December 1917, 1. We should note, therefore, that when socialists and leftists warnedof ‘pogroms’ (as they frequently did) they often had this more generalized conceptionin mind and, when referring specifically to antisemitic pogroms, they would ofteninsert the adjective evreiskie (Jewish) to denote ‘[anti-]Jewish pogroms’.

70 L’vov-Rogachevskii, Goniteli evreiskogo naroda v Rossii, 108.71 Novaia Zhizn’ was a newspaper established by Maxim Gorky after the February Revo-

lution. Politically orientating itself towards the Menshevik Internationalists (a numberof whom sat on the editorial board), it was sharply critical of revolutionary Bolshevismin late 1917. Gorky himself wrote a series of articles denouncing the Bolshevik attemptto seize power. See Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture andthe Bolsheviks, 1917–1918, trans. from the Russian by Herman Ermolaev (London: Garn-stone Press 1968).

72 ‘Maksim Gorky urges the Bolshieviks to deny that they are planning an uprising’, inBrowder and Kerensky (eds), The Russian Provisional Government, 1766.

73 Gal’perina, Startsev and Cherepenina (eds), Petrogradskii Sovet Rabochikh i SoldatskikhDeputatov v 1917 godu, vol. 4, 524. The Menshevik Internationalists were a faction ofthe Rossiyskaya sotsial-demokraticheskaya rabochaya partiya (RSDRP, RussianSocial Democratic Workers Party) that took an anti-war position in 1914.

74 Quoted in John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (London and New York: Penguin1977), 84.

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Jewish pogrom in the event of any Bolshevik attempt to take power.75 As lateas 28 October, the Mensheviks’ Petrograd Electoral Committee issued yetanother desperate appeal to workers in the capital, warning that all formsof protest would necessarily lead to pogroms: the Bolsheviks have seduced‘the ignorant workers and soldiers’, and the cry of ‘“All power to theSoviets!”’will all too easily turn into ‘“Beat the Jews, beat the shopkeepers”’.76

That same day, the Bolshevik Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich also issued an appealagainst antisemitism. Though he laid the blame squarely on the Black Hun-dreds, and not the Bolsheviks or their working-class supporters, the timingof his intervention reflected a widely held anxiety about the relationshipbetween revolution and antisemitism.77

These fears were replicated in the Jewish press. For example, a lead article inthe liberal Jewish newspaper Evreiskaia Nedelia on 15 October claimed that

comrade Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks call in their speeches and articles onthe proletariat to ‘turn their words into action’ (pereiti ot slovo k delu), but…wherever Slavic crowds gather, the turning of ‘words into action’ means, inreality, ‘striking out at the Yids’.78

The following week, the same publication warned on its front page that ‘socialrevolution in the minds of the Petrograd masses has become synonymouswith “Jewish pogrom”’.79

Contrary to these alarmist predictions, in the hours and days immediatelyfollowing the Bolshevik seizure of power, there were no mass pogroms inthe Russian interior. In the immediate sense, then, the revolution did not trans-late into antisemitic violence, as had been predicted. The warnings cited abovereveal just how deeply ingrained the fear of the ‘dark masses’was among sec-tions of the socialist left who claimed to speak in their name. This wasespecially true of the intelligentsia, who generally viewed a proletarian upris-ing with horror due to the violence and barbarity they believed would inevi-tably flow as a result. In contrast, and as confirmed in Nikolai Sukhanov’sclassic memoirs,80 what defined the Bolsheviks during this period was pre-cisely their closeness to the Petrograd masses so greatly feared by the intelli-gentsia.81 However, just six months later, in the spring of 1918 in the formerPale of Settlement, the warnings from the previous year began to ring true:in towns and cities of northeast Ukraine, such as Glukhov, Bolshevik power

75 Buldakov, Khaos i etnos, 488.76 Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, 289.77 Bonch-Bruevich, Krovavyi Navet na Khristian.78 ‘The soviet of the Russian Republic’.79 ‘Without panic’ (English translation of editorial title), Evreiskaia Nedelia, no. 42, 22

October 1917, 1.80 Nikolai Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917: A Personal Record, trans. from the

Russian by Joel Carmichael (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1984).81 I would like to thank Professor Christopher Read, who helped develop this point in a

private correspondence.

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was consolidated through anti-Jewish violence by the local cadres of the partyand Red Guards.82 At the party’s congress in mid-May 1918, the Bund leader-ship pointed out in no uncertain terms that the pogroms were ‘principally aconsequence of the presence of dark elements (temnykh elementov) whoattached themselves to the Bolshevik movement’.83 These pogroms, ofcourse, occurred not in Petrograd but in the quite different context ofUkraine. Nevertheless, they showed that the fears of the anti-Bolshevik social-ist left in late 1917 were not entirely without substance.

Beyond 1917

The events of 1917 prefigured in embryonic form the parameters of the so-called ‘Jewish question’ in the Russian Civil War of 1918 and 1919. FromJune and July 1917 onwards, it became increasingly apparent that antisemit-ism was a problem within sections of the now enlarged Bolshevik supportbase. The challenge facing the Bolsheviks, then, was not only to combat theantisemitism of the radical right but to disentangle the overlap between Bol-shevik radicalism and antisemitism within the movement itself. These pro-blems would heighten dramatically in 1918 and 1919 when the Civil Warextended into parts of the former Pale of Settlement, where the bulk of theJewish population resided. Here, when the Red Army fought for ‘Sovietpower’, the lines of demarcation between ‘antisemite’ and ‘internationalist’and ‘revolutionary’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ often collapsed along anaxis of antisemitic violence.84 This article has shown that these shockingevents did not come from nowhere: the articulation between antisemitismand revolutionary Bolshevism had been prefigured in 1917.Yet this article has also demonstrated that the Bolsheviks responded to such

antisemitism, and they did so by helping to build a broad socialist cross-partyalliance comprising all progressive social forces. The political expression ofthis united front was the soviets of workers’ and soldiers’deputies. Through-out mid- to late 1917, the soviets took a number of concrete measures, bothlocally and nationally, to confront rising antisemitism across Russian society.Despite the increasingly acute political differences and inter-party tensionsthat engulfed the soviets in the latter part of 1917, the Bolsheviks, like all

82 Cherikover, Antisemitizm i pogromy na Ukraine, 287–97; McGeever, ‘The Bolshevik Con-frontation with Antisemitism in the Russian Revolution’, 103–14; L. B. Miliakova, KnigaPogromov: Pogromy na Ukraine, v Belorussii i evropeiskoi chasti Rossii v periode Grazhdanskoivoiny 1918 – 1922 gg. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: ROSSPEN 2010), 6–8.

83 See K. M. Anderson, V. V. Shelokhaev and Iu. N. Amiantov (eds), Bund: Dokumenty iMaterialy, 1894–1921 (Moscow: ROSSPEN 2010), 1124–5. An edited version of this con-ference resolution, with the passage quoted above removed, was published in theBund’s newspaper Evreiskii Rabochii (The Jewish Worker), no. 3, 30 May 1917, 6.

84 For a full discussion, seeMcGeever, ‘The Bolshevik Confrontation with Antisemitism inthe Russian Revolution’, 99–115, 149–75.

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socialists, continued to stress the importance of the strategy of the united frontin combatting antisemitism. 1917 therefore produced a historic bloc of subal-ternity that offered a real challenge not just to class exploitation, but to formsof oppression such as antisemitism.However, if February 1917 produced such alliances, October pulled them

apart. Disagreeing profoundly on the Bolshevik acquisition of power, socialdemocrats were pushed into opposing camps on the question of whether tosupport the new Soviet government. The trajectory of the main Jewish socialistparty, the Bund, illustrates well the dilemmas thrown up by the actuality ofrevolution in October. On the evening of 25 October 1917, at an emergencymeeting to discuss the Bolshevik insurrection, the Central Committee of theBund called on ‘all revolutionary democratic forces’ to ‘form a coalition tofight against the coalition of counter-revolution’.85 The writing, however,was already on the wall: the ‘democratic forces’ of the soviets no longerstood on the same platform. The strategy of the united front to defend thegains of the February Revolution had now been superseded by the actualityof the October, socialist, Revolution. Later, in 1918, the Bund would splitinto left (pro-Soviet) and right (anti-Soviet) factions. The fact of Sovietpower had pushed the party into ‘revolutionary’ and ‘reformist’ camps, andeventually this would bring about a formal split in the party with the estab-lishment of the Communist Bund. In the radically changed conjuncture ofpost-October 1917, new alliances and new collective forms of anti-racistagency had to be forged to confront the ferocious pogroms of 1918 and1919. That story, however, remains outside the scope of this article.86

The Bolshevik encounter with antisemitism in 1917 serves as a vivid illus-tration that anti-racism does not flow automatically from socialist politics.On the contrary, anti-racism needs to be renewed and cultivated, continually.A century on, as we grapple with the damage done by racism to class politics,1917 can tell us much about how reactionary ideas can take hold, but also howthey can be challenged and confronted.

Brendan McGeever is Lecturer in the Sociology of Racialization and Antise-mitism at Birkbeck, University of London. His work focuses on racism andanti-racism historically up to the present day, particularly the relationshipbetween racialization and antisemitism. He also has a specialist interest inthe study of the former Soviet Union and the history of Marxism andMarxist theory. He is the author of The Bolsheviks and Antisemitism in theRussian Revolution (Cambridge University Press 2018). Email: b.mcgeever@bbk.ac.uk

85 Anderson, Shelokhaev and Amiantov (eds), Bund, 1104.86 For a detailed discussion, see McGeever, The Bolsheviks and Antisemitism in the Russian

Revolution. See also McGeever ‘The Bolshevik Confrontation with Antisemitism in theRussian Revolution’; and McGeever, ‘Bolshevik responses to antisemitism during theCivil War’.

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